Experimental poetry in four authors: Tablada, de Campos, Padin and Brossa

The purpose of this work is to investigate and elaborate on the experimental poetry work of four authors: José Juan Tablada (Mexico), Haroldo de Campos (Brazil), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), and Joan Brossa (Spain-Catalonia), identifying commonalities and differences between them. Tablada and de Campos share the influence of the Chinese ideogram and Mallarmé’s innovative poetic propositions. Another similarity between them is their work in translating or transcreating (a term coined by the Noigandres group) literary texts. With respect to Padín and Brossa, their commonalities reside in their need to openly express social and political views against totalitarian regimes in their countries. Another similarity is their investigation of the relationship between the word and the world, and their efforts to produce a poetic expression closer to reality.;Chapter 1 investigates José Juan Tablada’s work. Considered the first avant-garde poet in Spanish America, he was influenced by European avant-garde movements and the concept of the ideogram in Chinese and Japanese poetry. He created short poems that he called haikais, a clear reference to the Japanese haiku. In his visual poems, a visual image fuses with the text in a way that both elements interrelate with one another, which allows for a poetic amalgamation.;With regard to the notion of orientalism, Tabladas does not have the confrontational characteristics proposed by Edward Said. If there is a dichotomy between the avant-garde and modernity versus ideograms and antiquity, Tablada would have been the first Spanish American poet who navigated and negotiated between these two influences.;Chapter 2 analyzes Haroldo de Campos’s concrete poetry and his translation or transcreation activity. Also influenced by Mallarmé, the Chinese ideogram, Pound and Fenollosa, H. de Campos, along with his brother Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari founded the Brazilian concretist group Noigandres in the early 1950s. A concrete poem is a verbivocovisual composition that encompasses sound, visual and semantic elements. Its spatio-temporal structures contain a reduced verbal material that has been submitted to a rigid control process. It does not communicate subjective experiences, or transmit a prefigured message. Instead, the concrete poem aspires to exploit the visual, aural and semantic qualities of the verbal material and explore the possibilities inherent in phonic and visual correspondences.;Another topic developed in Chapter 2 is the comparison of H. de Campos’s and Tablada’s approaches to translation. Both poets worked on translating Japanese haiku into their native languages, but their approaches were different. Tablada adjusted the format of the traditional haiku into the Spanish syllabic organization, and incorporated Mexican cultural elements. By contrast, H. de Campos strived to keep as much of the Japanese format as possible in his transcreations. Instead of “braziliarizing” the Japanese language, he “nipponized” the Portuguese language.;Chapter 3 analyzes Clemente Padín’s visual poetry and mail art. Padín’s work will be connected to Joan Brossa’s visual and object poetry in Chapter 4. Both artists share the purpose of exposing social injustice and repression in works that clearly aim at having a socio-political impact on the reader/viewer. Padín’s performances and Brossa’s object poems transcend the white of the page as the only substratum on which to fix the message.;Chapter 4 investigates Joan Brossa’s visual poems and object poems. Brossa’s work not only was influenced by avant-garde movements, Marxism and Zen philosophy, but also by the traumatic experience of the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Brossa's work was ground breaking, radical, and subversive.;His visual poetry aimed at avoiding the morphological and syntactic rules, because they did not reflect the fundamental nature of the concept they alluded to. Brossa indicates that words do not denote, they simply are.;His object poems become a part of language without losing their characteristics as objects. They have a great impact on the reader/spectator who, through a personal reading, becomes their co-creator.